This is Why I Rarely Buy Digital Content

If you happen to visit my home, you’ll see in the basement a wall shelf stuffed with DVDs. There’s no more room on the shelves. There are DVDs stacked on top, precariously, ready to tumble.

Ditto the compact discs on another smaller shelf on a different wall.

While we do own some digital content, when it comes time to “buy” an album or a movie, sure as shootin’ you’ll see we buy a physical copy.

This is why.

We’re like Miz Booth in the Farley Family reunion, who took her x-rays home from the doctor because she paid for them.

I realize owning physical media carries risks with it. They’re not nearly as portable as digital copies. They can get ruined or lost. They need to be stored, as on our wonky shelves.

But once bought, once taken care of, they’re ours. Nobody can arbitrarily take them from us, unless we’re robbed.

Robbed. That’s probably a good word for what some purveyors of digital content are doing.

This isn’t to say we don’t use digital content. I watch a good number of movies and television shows for free thanks to Amazon Prime. With these Prime viewings, however, I know the contract is different. They’re offered to me for free to use. I don’t own them. If they go away, that’s my sign to find something else to watch. They’re part of the value of our Amazon Prime membership.

But if I paid top dollar for, say, a season of Psych, I’m going to be upset if some obscure clause in the terms of service indicate what I’ve bought really isn’t mine to keep.

Terms and Conditions:

Someone tries this on me, I won’t buy from them again. Ever. I may singlehandedly keep the physical media manufacturers in business.

This also brings up another point: If I were ever to get a book published, how would I want my digital customers to be treated?

Well, once they buy the book, digital or not, it’s theirs.

You Okay, Pukka Sahib?

Started reading George Orwell’s “Burmese Days” a few weeks ago, and just picked it up again this morning.

Right at the good part.

Orwell wrote the book, of course, to support his anti-colonial views, and he does an admirable job of it. Through the eyes of Flory, his main character, Orwell demonstrates the cowardly thinking that supported colonialism for so long. And what he writes is also pertinent, I think, to society as a whole.

He writes:

For as his brain developed – you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life – he had grasped the truth about the English and their Empire. The Indian Empire is a despotism – benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object. . . . The real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the Army. Given the Army, the officials and the business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

First, ouch.

And yeah, that sounds like complaints we’re hearing today. We as a nation are pretty content and are developing late – I see it in my students, I see it in myself.

What is our backbone? Because we in the US have officials that are as useless (for the most part) as those Orwell describes, leaving the real work to be done by functionaries. The military-industrial complex comes to mind, but part of me thinks that’s too easy of a vaudeville villain to trot out – but it might be the only apt comparison. Because it’s the banks and industry that got the bailouts in 2008, not necessarily the forgotten men.

Are we cherishing and fortifying our dullness behind a quarter of a million corporate ledgers?

I don’t know. I’m like Flory – my brain is still developing, and developing late. How committed am I to a wrong way of life? Am I, like Dave Barry, much less interested (he wrote, as he looked at the notes he left himself) to ENDING WORLD HUNGER than I am to BUYING DETERGENT?

Possibly.

See, I have to have economics explained to me via cartoon.

He writes further:

It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored. In England it is hard even to imagine such an atmosphere. Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator, but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahib’s code.

What is our code? It is increasingly twisted, in which we can show outrage when a black man is murdered by a neighborhood watchman but no national discussion ensues when two black teenagers kill an 88-year-old war veteran in a botched robbery. One is racism. The other is something that just happens, and, hey, there was no racial intent in the robbery. So it is not discussed. It is when we can discuss corporate profits overflowing while wages for the workers remain stagnant or slip as inflation increases. That cannot be discussed. It is when those who oppose abortion are called “Anti-choice,” by the press, though they would prefer to be called “pro-life,” and where the press immediately starts calling a man “she” when he announces that’s what he’d prefer. It is where there is an urge to tax churches the same as for-profit organizations because they dare to urge their members to speak politically, and then urge that those political discussions be censored, stifled, or otherwise drowned out in a sea of noise more to the pukka sahibs’ liking.

We are not colonialists, but we, just Orwell writes, are “creature[s] of the despotism, a pukka sahib, tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of tabus.”

I Am Not A Social Gamer

I resisted for a long time.

Send me a Farmville request via Facebook? Ignored the request will be, as Yoda might say. Don't have time for that kind of shenanigans. I don't want to be on Facebook to play games. I'm on Facebook to babble incoherently at my friends and relatives and otherwise make a nuisance of myself, but not to play games.

I have a Kindle Fire for games.

Thus Oregon Trail: American Settler.

I think this started out on Facebook, but then the app developers -- and they're all apps now, they're not games or software or whatever they are, they're all apps; I expect an app-brand breakfast cereal to come out any day now. (Just did a quick Google search to see if someone hasn't already come out with an app-brand cereal. Doesn't look like it. But there is this app that will help you pick a healthier breakfast cereal and an app that's a cereal simulator.)

But back to American Settler.

I don't play it on Facebook. But it's on the Kindle Fire, and it's addicting.

And maddening.

I'm a big simulator player. I got the original Sim City when it came out and have been a loyal Sim City player through the game's current iteration, and can't wait for the next one to come out. But because I'm not a social gamer -- there's a phrase nobody was talking about five years ago -- I skipped the Sims phenomenon. I played around briefly with Second Life, but never saw the appeal of either. And still don't. So to be playing a game that constantly invites me to share my progress with others (as if anyone else will care) and to beg and barter with others for the goods and virtual "energy" needed to complete tasks in the game is maddening.

It's not fear or loathing of interaction. We regularly have game nights with some friends, and we get to competing and cooperating throughout those games. I know how it can work out. And not. But to say that I constantly want to badger my friends with game requests is ludicrous to say the least. So I don't. And I don't spend any "real" money in-app, either. I suppose people do this. There are marketing strategies built around in-app purchases. But I hark back to the time when you wanted to play a video game, you just played it. Granted, they looked like this:

But you just played.

BURGER WAAARRRRR!

This probably would affect me more if I were buying ebooks, not scrounging the interwebs for free ones or having free ones delivered to my Kindle Fire on a regular basis.

But as an author who is planning to publish his own ebook this summer, perhaps I should be worried: Free ebooks are nice, but they don’t pay for the mustard and ketchup.

“This,” of course, is the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and publishers McMillan and Penguin, alleging the companies colluded to fix the price on ebooks so the companies could get more money at the expense of the book-buying public. Three other publishers (Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins) settled with the DOJ out of court.
No word yet on what the full legal defense from Apple et al will be, but I’m sure it’ll be interesting, with a swirl of accusations against Amazon for flooding the market with cheap ebooks in order to sell items like, ahem, the Kindle Fire, and plenty of stories of doom and gloom and more doom from publishers and authors and their children being tossed out in the snow with their frostbitten teddy bears because nobody (including me) is willing to pay premium prices for books, print or e, any more due to the changing times.

Bloomberg gets a peek at their strategery:

Apple and Macmillan, which have refused to engage in settlement talks with the Justice Department, deny they colluded to raise prices for digital books, according to people familiar with the matter. They will argue that pricing agreements between Apple and publishers enhanced competition in the e-book industry, which was dominated by Amazon.com Inc.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, writing at Fortune, has this to say on the situation:

According to the Journal, the government has argued that the waiting period would allow publishers and booksellers to resume a one-to-one relationship, "free of the taint of collusion."

The length of that cooling-off period is reported to be one of the sticking points for Apple, and it's easy to see why.

An extended cooling-off period -- in which Amazon goes back to selling bestselling e-books for $9.99 and Apple is still adding its 30% surcharge to the publishers' prices -- could seriously damage Apple's e-book business.

Worse still, it could keep the books off the iBookstore altogether.

Apple's lawyers seem to think they can make a case that going to the agency model actually increased competition, allowing e-book rivals to take back some of the 90% market share Amazon had amassed.

Moreover the company -- unlike most book publishers -- has pockets deep enough to do legal battle with the U.S. government for as long as it takes to get a settlement more to its liking.

More of his article here.

Matthew Yglesias, writing at Slate.com, takes up a contrary position, saying that the DOJ's involvement isn't nexessary:

What makes a major publishing house a major publishing house is its expertise in the manufacture and distribution of books. As an ancillary element of the business, publishers are also good at recruiting authors, editing prose, and publicizing new works. But firms with expertise in writing, editing, and publishing text are a dime a dozen. Slate has that know-how, as does every newspaper and magazine in the country and a huge quantity of independent and university presses. Even more troubling for traditional publishers, famous authors now have unprecedented ability to simply bypass the entire publishing system. If Suzanne Collins wants to sell a Hunger Games prequel directly to her readers, does anyone doubt she’d sell vast quantities? Celebrities could even potentially become their own publishing brands, using their fame to substitute for a traditional market apparatus. Oprah Winfrey has a proven ability to drive book sales. Why not launch an Oprah Press?

But the only way for these firms to stay viable is to publish books people like and to sell them at a price readers want to pay. Whether they merge, collude, or simply find a convenient confluence of interests around Apple’s efforts to compete with Amazon, there’s no real threat to competition here. Literary culture, for better or for worse, is dealing with a radically transformed business landscape. The Justice Department is, at best, irrelevant to this process.

As a soon-to-be-self-published author, there is concern here on both sides of the fence. While writing a book is in of itself a satisfying endeavor, it would be nice to think that somewhere along the way I could get a little money for all that work. The agency model under question by the DOJ does just that – it makes sure adequate gobs of money are changing hands so that the author – presumably – gets some of it too. I could say that as a self-published noob, that does not apply since I have no chance in hell of getting paid to publish anyway. That’s probably an accurate assessment. But a little part of me screams “I ought to make some kind of money along the way.” Even though that first ebook is going to be given away for free so’n I can build meself an audience.

A Few Technological Predictions

Prediction One: I will have an iPad of my very own within a year.

This I know because after having the opportunity to play with my wife’s iPad over the past ten days, I note my iPod Touch is impossibly small. A bit of plankton in a sea now populated by tablet whales. Svelte whales, because my laptop is impossibly heavy. Do I really need new electronic devices? No. but I can see the iPad’s obvious utility, if only for the ability to watch movies on a slightly larger screen or to play “Ticket to Ride” without having to fuss with a mouse. (Yeah, I know I wrote a few weeks ago about you being able to take my mouse once you can pry it from my cold, dead hand, but the past ten days with that iPad has convinced me that I was, perhaps, wrong in that assessment.) Still don’t like the finger grease all over the screen, though. Maybe if someone invented a false fingertip . . . Oh yeah. They already did.

Prediction Two: My wife, building on the advance of her iPad, will have an iPhone or some kind of all-access-to-the-Internet device within two years.

The tightwad in both of us screams at this prediction, but the practicality of having such a device is eroding at our collective Scroogishness. I hope that by holding out for another year or two, we’ll see further technological advances that make this connectedness less expensive and – might I dare say this – not necessarily connected to an expensive sell phone contract. (I’m envisioning a nationwide network devoted solely to data, which could include voice-as-data services a la Skype, to get the cell phone companies’ fingers out of this pie. Of course, that’s just shifting the finger-in-pie from one collective of greedmeisters to another entirely new collective, but maybe along the way they might figure out how to make it less expensive. Oh, sometimes I just make myself laugh.

UPDATE: Today's Dilbert comic strip kinda fits in pretty well with this post:

There's an iPad in the House

Grandpa Griffin got himself an iPad 2 – because there’s a “2” after the name, of course – so his original iPad is now at our house. Given that Michelle successfully sneaked it into the house without me finding out about it, I’m pretty content to let it be hers.

And, yes, I would take one if it were offered to me. Thinking about how I might winkle one out for Christmas, though they seem pretty spendy to me still.

But that’s not the substance of this post.

I have a bet with a former college instructor that the iPad and other such tablet PCs will not lead to the development of new industries. He’s convinced that the iPad and its ilk will spawn new, glorious industries that do not yet exist. I have a hard time believing that. I can see where current industry will make us of it, but I’m hard-pressed to identify any new industries that might arise due to the fact that we now have hand-held, powerful computing devices at our disposal. Smartphones didn’t lead to an industrial paradigm shift, after all – though expansion of current industry isn’t out of the question and is, in fact, pretty obvious.

I have had the opportunity to play around with the iPad a bit – it’s been my job to get it connected to iTunes, to get her father’s personal information removed from it, etc. That has caused some trouble at home, as iTunes itself is pretty clunky when it comes to using multiple devices on a single computer (I’m still confused as to why Apple has to tie its products (iPhone excluded) to another device for updates and such). Michelle’s computer is already home to her iPod Touch and her iPod Nano; mine is home to my iPod Touch and potentially our older iPod, so the iPad is now connected to the kids’ computer. I still prefer the interface built into the Sony MP3 player I have; it just plugs and plays, doesn’t need PC software to run, and can connect to anybody’s computer without requiring reconfiguration or any data dumping. I still believe for the iPads and such to be truly “magical” they need to cut the PC tether.

And we need ubiquitous, low-cost wi-fi.

We spent the weekend with friends who have iPads and iPhones. We were camping. They were connected at all times – because they have grandfathered data plans and are willing to pay the monthly fees for such. I’ve written in the past that I’m not as willing. Well, I would be if there were a less expensive solution. So I’ll keep spitting into one hand and wishing into the other, and see which one fills the fastest. I am going to make a prediction, however: Michelle is beginning to see the utility of always being connected, so the day may come – I’ll say within two years – that we migrate over to some kind of plan for which we pay monthly access for that everywhere connection. Again, an expansion of industry, not the creation of a new one, unless, of course, someone wants to create a national wi-fi network.

Man Without Smartphone

UPDATE: Farhad Manjoo's call in Slate.com for a cheaper iPhone, coincidentally, falls with the announcement that Apple may offer a free iPhone 3G on contract starting in the fall. Still doesn't get me around the ol' monthly charge for cell/data service, however . . .

The only way I could be more backwards – or maybe retro, given hipster affectations for All Things Old Except Politics – in the world of telephony is if I went to the thrift store and brought home one of those rotary dial phones they have there. While I’d look a bit silly toting one of those onto the bus for my morning and evening commute, it would certainly be less expensive (and, yes, less useful) than a modern cell phone.

But I have one of those. Well, modern in the may it cal make phone calls from pretty much everywhere the bus goes (though I can’t make calls form inside my building, too much RF interference from the engineers’ radios next door). I have a randomly-branded and –named dumbphone through Tmobile, pay-as-you-go, that costs us maybe $50 a year.

That’s why I don’t have a smartphone. Sure, I can’t browse the internet or get email on my dumbphone (and I don’t even carry that with me; it’s pretty much my wife’s phone), but I also sure don’t spend $50, $60, or $80 a month for the privilege of having a smartphone to mess around with.

Farhad Manjoo, over at Slate, argues that Apple needs to come out with a cheaper iPhone to help the unwashed masses like myself dive into the world of smartphones.

Not so. While I might balk at the idea of paying $200 for a top of the line iPhone if I were interested in getting a smartphone, what steers me from smartphones (and cell phones in general) is not the price of the phone, but the price of the monthly service. I don’t have $600 to $1000 to toss into cell phone coverage for a year. Remember how I said we spend less than $50 a year on our current cell phone? That’s all I’m willing to pay.

Would it be nice to have email and internet capability all the while I’m on the 1 ½ hour bus ride home? Yes, it would. Is it necessary? No. So I look at the opportunity cost and decide I’d rather spend that money on something else.

Ah, many argue – you still have a landline at home. That costs you about $35 a month – $420 a year – plus the at-home high speed internet service, another $360 a year. Yes I do. But don’t compare apples to oranges here.

I could eliminate the landline and substitute a smartphone for it. But I’m still spending more money for phone service. Moving money from one bucket to another and calling it a cost savings (which is what most people tout when they brag they’ve gotten rid of their landline) is disingenuous. And while there are ways to tether cell phones to work as high-speed internet lines, cell phone carriers are clamping down on that – all that internet browsing is cutting down on the bandwidth others might want to use, for, say, making a phone call. So I’d have to retain my at-home high speed internet and pay extra to have an internet-capable smartphone. I just can’t pry the wallet open far enough to do that.

So I will remain smartphoneless. And not unhappily so.

Death of the Mouse?

So, according to TIME magazine’s Techland blog, the mouse is doomed.

Doomed, I say, doomed. Just – dare I say it – like these guys:

Because of Apple, of course. Everything that is dooming computer technology as we know it is either due to texting or Apple.

I’m a bit skeptical about all this touch technology they’re touting. You know, I like my iPod Touch. I like tapping on it, not having to have a keyboard or mouse attached to it. I like the pinching and other touchy-feely things I can do to manipulate text, games and such. To a point. Playing Galaga or Dig-Dug on these devices is crap. The games beg for a joystick. Maybe someday somebody will be able to wire an old Atari 2600 joystick to an iPod Touch, and I’ll play those games again. Don’t ask me to tilt the thing to get things to move. My geriatric brain – a match to the photo of the age-spotted hand Techland includes in their story – just doesn’t work that way.

I have a laptop that has a touchpad instead of a mouse. I don’t like it. When I type on the keyboard, my wrists brush against the touchpad and bad things happen. Now Apple wants to sell us something (surprise, surprise) called a Trackpad. Techland uses the word “magic” to describe the Trackpad. I’m not sure if they’re poking fun at Apple for their overuse of the word or just in awe of Apple’s overuse of the word. Doesn’t matter.

Jason Fox, I think, illustrates the pitfalls of changing from a simple directional pointing device like the mouse to anything more complex.

Though it’s inevitable, as Zits point out.

Okay, Apple. I’ll send you my wallet. Again.

Hey, You, Get Into the Cloud

See if you can wrap your head around this one. Because I can’t.

Apple is now offering the iCloud – a web-based service for storing our music, movies, photos, brain cells, whatever – in a way that’ll let us sync that content to up to ten devices, thus ridding the cumbersome and space-hogging method currently used, which is storing all of that stuff on our own hard drives and either having to create clunky playlists or do somersaults to log in as a different user in order to sync more than one iPod on one computer.

Sounds great, yes?

Well, wait until you read the fine print.

It’s free for up to 5 gig of music downloaded via iTunes. In other words, music you buy from the record labels via Apple. I have none of that. No, for schlubs like me who rip their music from CDs (I don’t steal it; get that out of your heads) the service costs $25 a year. Fair enough. Apple can’t exactly give away the storage space for free, you know.

This “iMatch” service also applies to storing illegally-obtained music, providing one volunteers to pay for it via iTunes for the privilege of storing it in the cloud.

This, of course, makes record execs ecstatic. So reports CNN, cobbling from Rolling Stone:

It is one way to make someone pay for music they've already bought. It's pretty ingenious," Syd Schwartz, a former EMI Music executive who is now a consultant to artist managers and record labels, tells Rolling Stone. "I'm sure someone in an executive office at a major label somewhere is going, 'At least that's one way we can monetize the stuff people stole from Napster over the years.'

And that’s fine, too. These people stealing music shouldn’t be allowed to use the service unless they’re willing to pay for what they’ve stolen. So guess what? They won’t use it.

And I won’t use it either. Not because I have any qualms on paying for music, but because I don’t want to pay someone else to store stuff I’ve already paid for when I can store it at home for free. Yes, the syncing remains clunky. But that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make.

We bought a one-gig external hard drive for $89 a few years ago. It’s paying for itself just serving as a spot for us to store our digital photos. I haven’t bothered migrating music or movies over to it, simply because our collections of such aren’t large. Storing them in the cloud may make sense from the point of view of convenience, but not from the point of view of cost. Luckily, I have a Sony MP3 player that’ll sync with whatever computer I choose, so that makes the syncing simple. Only Apple seems to want to make it complicated.

But they’re not the only ones wanting lolly for the privilege. Google offers Google Music, free for a limited time. May check that out. Amazon offers its Cloud Drive, with 5 gig of free storage. We’ll have to see what restrictions apply.

Jared Newman, writing for PCWorld, is dismissive of Amazon’s service, mainly on the pricing, saying that “cloud storage isn’t quite ready to replace a trusty external hard drive.” Obviously I agree with that. I bought a computer with three gigs of internal memory, so storage isn’t all that much of a problem. Neither is lost files, since all of the music I enjoy comes from my physical music collection. Well, I have some freebie stuff and podcasts and the like that I don’t have on physical media, but if it were lost, I probably wouldn’t shed a lot of tears about it.

There are disadvantages to Google and Amazon’s products – no Apple device support, at least as far as I can tell. That seems odd, so I’m probably wrong, but what I’m reading says they’re Android-supporters only.

That leaves mSpot, which has free Android and iPhone apps – presumably, it works for the iPod Touch and iPad as well. But there’s another disadvantage – mSpot only supports one device for free, for up to five devices, ya gotta pay $3.99 a month (so on price, iCloud wins; mSpot comes in at close to twice iCloud’s cost per year). So for scum like me that want the freemium advantages with multiple device syncing, there’s nowhere to go. (See Ginny Mies’ comparison of the four services at PCWorld here.) I suppose you could game mSpot and set up multiple accounts on the free system, but I suspect they’ll have ways to counter such shenanigans. Further investigation is warranted.

Privacy and Apple Tracking

I don’t know how much of a private life I have any more. I blog incessantly. I’m on the most popular social networking sites – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn – and have a presence or persona on any number of other sites ranging from the public – Uncharted, of course, and places like Consumerist, the New York Times, Slate – and private, including the places I work, CWI and BYU-Idaho.

There’s also that ethereal detritus of the Internet, ranging from sites I created at the University of Idaho when the Internet was in its public infancy – stored, it seems, in perpetuity thanks to the folks at the Wayback Machine – and some few evidences of my nearly decade-long career as a poor community journalist.

Oh yeah. Then there are the sites where I once was, but am no longer, due to disinterest or whatever. Those sites include Gawker, Second Life, eBay, and others – the first of which e-mailed me a while back because of a security breach at their end. I changed a few passwords and such, and hope for the best.

Thing is we don’t really know who is collecting data on us, or what they’re doing with that data, or what other people could do with their data. The iPhone/iPad “tracking” debacle ongoing right now, along with the plunge into outer darkness of the Sony PlayStation online thingie have got a lot of people worried about their “privacy.” (And what's up with playing games over the Internet? When I was a boy we played alone with our Atari 2600s and we LIKED it.)

But I wonder: Does privacy exist any more?

I don’t think so.

And we’re to blame.

My wife chides me incessantly for oversharing on the Internet. I have cut back on what I share and what I don’t share. But the Internet never forgets.

And here’s one thing about the Apple situation – if that data could be used somehow to track a stolen product, wouldn’t consumers be happy that Apple included such a feature – which they’re now calling a “bug” in its products?

And here’s another thing about the Apple situation – apparently it’s a federal law that cell phones have the ability to track a phone’s whereabouts, per Geek.com. Of course, nowhere in the act does it say that this data has to be recorded for months, but Apple’s most loyal fans, it seems, are grabbing at straws to defend the company in this latest of breathless Internet brouhahas.

Would I be concerned if I discovered my cell phone were tracking my movements and storing that information? Maybe. It wouldn’t reveal all that much, or certainly less than my blogs and Facebook and Uncharted sharings reveal about my movements, and they’re about as real time as any thief would need, I suppose, to go to my house and rob us blind of the possessions it took us a lifetime to shop for.

Apple, of course, denies any nefarious mischief.

The breathless Internet, as Scott Adams so wonderfully points out, doesn’t care what Steve Jobs is saying about the situation. Backpedal, backpedal, blah blah blah bling bling bling blah is all they hear. Even though what Jobs is saying sounds pretty reasonable. He tells All Things Digital:

As new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education. We haven’t–as an industry–done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week.

Poor communication and people jumping to conclusions. Breathless Internet indeed.

Tablet PCs, Part II

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not debating the utility of tablet PCs. I really enjoy using my iPod Touch over my laptop as I commute from work, as the Touch is much, much lighter. But that’s about it. Typing on either device while bouncing along in bucket seats on an old bus isn’t fun. But either works just as well for movie-watching, music-listening, and the occasional text-reading or text-typing. The only advantage the Touch has over the laptop is the portability.

You’ve got to remember you’re talking with a person who learned keyboarding in high school on an electric typewriter that had the really snazzy feature of being able to correct errors using built-in correction fluid strips. Believe me, that was quite the innovation over the standard typewriter correction method, which I mutilated to perfection when I used the old 1950s-era Royal typewriter I got when I turned twelve – I was a weird kid, okay? On that machine, I had to use White-Out, that sticky white correction fluid that came in a bottle that looked like wart medicine. The secret with that stuff was to let it dry completely before you typed over it, lest your typewriter key end up covered in white goo.

Moving up to the slick electronic typewriters in high school was a pretty fantastic leap – but you know what? Those electronic typewriters were still pretty much in the same league as that old Royal, except that they allowed me to work faster and correct my mistakes more neatly.

I see the same with tablet PCs versus laptops or desktops. With a tablet PC, yes there is that portability, that ability to work anywhere I want to, but I just don’t see that the tablet PC is making that same quantum leap from the electronic typewriter to the PC Junior.

And as rare as it is to see a home with a typewriter or a school with a typewriter or a coffee-shop klatcher pull a typewriter out of a bag and start banging away, they still make typewriters, some of them comparable in price to the iPad.

Who in the world is buying them? I don’t know. But obviously someone is, or they wouldn’t still be on the market.

John C. Dvorak, writing for PC Magazine on Jan. 20, 2011, points out that today’s tablet PCs are thriving because they’re being used as output devices, not input devices:

The attempts at pad machines go way back to lost machines, such as the Momenta and WinPad machines, which led to Apple taking a crack at it with the Newton. These early machines all stemmed from flawed thinking. The flawed thinking was the pad itself. It was always assumed that the pad was going to be primarily an input device, like a paper and pen notepad. The successful machines of today are primarily output devices, not a notepad.

I will concede that Dvorak tends to be a bit schizophrenic in his criticism of tablet PCs, one year decrying demands that such devices come with styluses because he loses them all the time, the next wondering why the iPad doesn’t come with a stylus so he can doodle up some stuff.

All of this reminds me of something else that was supposed to be revolutionary: Google Buzz. Odd Todd sums up that situation well enough for us here:

Tablet PCs Revolutionary? Wake Me After the Hyperbole Is Over

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes. Oh, those revolutionary machines . . .

So maybe I've started a Facebook War, and given my ineptitude at Facebook, perhaps that's not a good thing.

The topic du jour is tablet PCs, namely the iPad 2. The statement was made by a former college professor that because tablet PCs are now media consumption and communication and production devices, they are thus revolutionary and bound to be the face of new multi-million dollar companies.

That I doubt. Here's what I said:

You know, I hate to be the one to roll my eyes over this, but I have a hard time believing tablet pcs in any shape or form are going to be the foundation for any multi-million dollar businesses outside of the hardware companies making them, and maybe the Angry Birds people. They're just not that revolutionary, folks. The only advantage I see that they have over desktops and laptops -- which are also media consumption and communication and production devices -- is their cachet and portability, which hardly seem revolutionary to me, given that smartphones also have that cachet and portability but the only ones really getting rich off of those are the cell phone companies.

I say this as a proud owner of an iPod Touch which has been nice to have but certainly isn't revolutionary in any way - it's lighter than my laptop, I'll give it that.

Where's the new terrain that's being explored? I'll bet good money that desktops and laptops have already been there.

I'm prepared to eat crow on this if we can take this beyond the hyperbole.

I'm not alone in thinking this. John Swansburg, writing for Slate.com, penned an anti iPad screed titled “I Hate My iPad. Can my tablet-loving Slate colleagues convince me I didn't just waste $600?” Here's what he says:

I think it's amazing that Apple has convinced so many people to pay $600 for what seem like such marginal improvements in their lifestyles—$600 to be able to check my e-mail in bed in a slightly more comfortable fashion than I can on my laptop seems sort of crazy when I stop and think about it.

He goes on to say that typing on the iPad is “beastly” – something I'll echo about my iPod Touch – making it still more of a consumtpion device than a production device. And yes, there are people out there no doubt developing smart pens and such with which you can write on your iPad screen – but how much of an improvement is that over a pen and a bit of paper? And given how bad my handwriting is, will the technology ever exist to be able to translate my henscratchings into legible text? I'm not holding my breath.

I've written one and one-thirds of a novel in the past year. Some of it, on the iPod Touch. But that's been relegated to notes and a few short snatches, given the iPod Touch's typing limitations. The rest of it – nearly 100 percent in fact, has been done on a steady stream of trusty old desktop computers.

Additionally, per Catharine Smith writing at the Huffington Post, the iPad and its ilk are certainly not revolutionary. She points out that the first tablet could easily be considered to be 1964's RAND, which included a clunky CRT and a pen with which one could write on the screen. I'd look pretty silly climbing on the bus, pulling out my RAND and calling it revolutionary to my busmates, wouldn't I? And the sleekness, the portability, the power, certainly give today's tablet PCs strong advantages over the RAND, but I've yet to hear anyone truly explain to me how these toys are any more revolutionary than the desktop I'm writing this on or the laptop I've got stowed in my bag for a weekend of writing and production seminars.

Yes, I'm sure people will point out to me many, many articles out there that do say tablet PCs are revolutionary, “magic,” or whatever other adjective is currently in voge. I've read a lot of them. And basically what they boil down to is this: They're portable! They're groovy! Steve Jobs said they're magical! Take my money! I want five of them, please!

Again, I'll say it: I'm prepared to eat crow on this if we can take tablet PCs past the hyperbole.

Seven and A Half Cents . . .

Used here under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

Add this to the number of reasons I’m neither in a hurry to get a tablet computer nor for Uncharted to get too deeply into the mobile app business:

Apple’s going evil.

Situation No. 1: Nobody in the publishing industry right now is paying anybody 30 percent of their subscription revenue to an outside party to distribute their goods. This is why newspapers, for example, handle their own bulk delivery and contract out individual delivery to children. So for Apple to tell publishers that they want 30 percent of “all sales” generated through mobile apps via Apple just to say hello is a bit of a shock.

Seven and a half cents may not mean a thing in this world, but 30 percent, now, that’s something worth woofing over.

And, per CNN, some folks are woofing:

Online music provider Rhapsody, which currently makes its streaming service available on Apple's iPhones and iPads, fired off a scathing statement to several tech blogs.

"Our philosophy is simple too -- an Apple-imposed arrangement that requires us to pay 30 percent of our revenue to Apple ... is economically untenable," the company said. "We will be collaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development."

Apple’s also souring the e-book market, per CNN:

Earlier this month, the company spooked e-reader makers when it refused to greenlight Sony's Reader app. Sony's sin: It routed users who wished to buy books through a Web app, which cut Apple out of the revenue stream.

CNET writes that it’s as yet unclear how companies such as Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Netflix will react to Apple’s cash grab:

For iPad-centric publications like the recently launched The Daily, Apple's 30 percent is baked into the business plan. But this probably doesn't work for many content sellers that can't afford to have those percentages skimmed off sales. Whether there's a viable workaround for companies or whether this is a negotiating tactic by Apple is unclear. But eventually this may develop into a game of chicken, with companies threatening to pull their apps from the App Store and initiate legal action while Apple continues to flex its muscles and demand what it feels is its proper due for creating a huge market. According to law professors interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article, Apple's new subscription service could draw antitrust scrutiny.

So if, for example, Uncharted were to create a mobile app – which we’re working on – that included the option to buy books, photographs, swag and gear, then Apple gets a 30 percent cut of all the sales we make. And if we decide we’re better off simply using our app to provide links to our web site for purchases, Apple can shut our app down.

Folks, this would be like Microsoft getting a cut from all the companies we buy stuff from via the internet, simply because we’re using a Windows-based PC to do our shopping. Nobody would be happy with that, right?

Yes, Apple is doing a wonderful thing by creating an app-based market where companies can reach out to people and offer them things for sale. But Apple, not content with selling the hardware and making a healthy profit off of it, now wants to dip its fingers in other pots of money, simply because it has the muscle to do so. This smacks of the horizontal or vertical integration many industries indulged in more than a century ago, leading to the trust-busting of Teddy Roosevelt.

Apple, the publishers you’re trying to woo have figured it out.

Yet Another "Life-Changing" Announcement from Apple

I know every basement blogger is writing about this.

I know a fair contingent will have the same opinion as I.

But really, Mr. Jobs: Having the Beatles come to iTunes is a “life-changing” event?

How? I want to know how.

I have lived for the past 38 years without a single Beatles album in my house. Oh, sure, I might recognize a Beatles tune on the radio. We did goofy indoor exercises ranging from rope-jumping to ball-bounding to drawing concentric circles on the blackboard to “Penny Lane” when I was in the third grade at Lincoln Elementary School.

But life-changing? Really?

You’re the boy who cried wolf, Apple. In the past three years, well, we’ve had the Beatles from you. We’ve had the iPad from you. The iPhone Mark Whatever. All life-changing events.

A cure for cancer, that’s life-changing.

The return of Christ, that’s life changing. (Oh, but you have returned. And run a computer company. I forgot. Please forgive me.)

Making available digital music by the Beatles – the same music that’s been around for, oh, fifty years now? Not life-changing. Someone at Apple please make a note of that.

Don't Slip on This Peel

So the Peel is real.

I’m seriously thinking about buying one of these Sprint lovelies that will let me convert my 32 GB iPod Touch into something that resembles a smart phone. I’d like the ability to send my wife an e-mail or two or catch her on the phone (this device would let me make calls via Skype) while on the bus to and from work – Tuesday’s half-hour-late arrival home while she was at the bus stop waiting for me is a good reason why.

But I’m cheap.

It’s not the $80 outlay for the device, which slides right onto my iPod Touch. It’s the $30 a month for the 1 GB-limit data plan through Sprint to actually make the device work that’s making me balk. Now, as smartphones go, that’s a relatively reasonable monthly fee for what you get, but as we’re very used to not having a monthly charge for any telecommunications device outside our landline, I’m not sure I can justify the expense.

OK. I’m sure: I can’t justify it. It’s just not in the budget for the few times I might use the service. That’s $360 a year that could easily be funneled into something more constructive, such as paying down our mortgage or Michelle’s tuition – another installment of which we’ve got coming before the year is out.

Still, that’s just at half the monthly cost for an iPhone. Or any other fancy-pants smartphone. This could be may way in.

So I’ll put it in the maybe pile, the pile perhaps I can dig into if I eventually get at teaching gig at BYU-Idaho, part-time. If I kept the data use manageable, I could justify using a Peel to keep up on my teaching duties while on the bus, so I’ll keep that in mind. It would allow me to use dead time in a much more productive way, especially as the Peel also – theoretically – can act as a wi-fi router, so I could use my laptop to communicate with my students through this little device.

So we’ll see what happens.

Attention Whoring

So, my friend, what exactly are you entitled to?

Air, for one. And water. Food, shelter, clothing, a peaceful place to live. Most of that – well, all of that – I have to pay for, directly through chunks out of my paycheck and indirectly, through chunks out of my taxes.

The rest is gravy, right?

In the immortal words of Beavis and Butt-Head: Huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh.

I laugh because we, as humans, tend to believe we’re entitled to a lot more than what really ought to be coming our way. Take Chelsea Kate Isaacs, 22, journalism student at Long Island University, upset beyond reason that she couldn’t get a quote from Apple on the use of its popular iPad in academic settings.

Never mind that there are thousands – I googled “ipad use in academic settings” just a few moments ago and got 240,000 hits – of legitimate sources out there of people using the widget in the whoosis configuration. She wanted a quote from Apple. Five or six voice mails (or e-mails, she’s a bit muddled in her tale at Valleywag) and she’s not getting what she wants, so she e-mails Steve Jobs.

Who responds, curtly, that it’s not Apple’s job to get her a good grade.

She’s miffed beyond all reason. Now thousands of more people are either blue in the face defending Apple or just sagely nodding their heads, sure that Mr. Jobs really is, well, kind of a wiener.

Because Miss Isaacs was entitled to a quote. For her grade.

Never mind that she identifies herself as a “student journalist.” Never mind that she repeatedly says she’s “on deadline.” And never mind that Apple is probably inundated with hundreds of requests for information from many, many journalists, students or not, on a daily basis, not to forget the fanboys, oddballs, Gozer-worshippers and other hangers-on that must make the phones at the Apple PR department ring off the hook constantly. Miss Isaacs didn’t get her quote. Steve Jobs was mean to her in a reply. She’s going to get a B on her assignment and, in a nation already awash with journalists, be just one of the many hapless rabble of victimized journalists who didn’t get that one bit of information they wanted for their story in order to meet their deadline.

Student journalist? Dime a dozen.

And is this even real? Jobs has been known to respond to people who e-mail him but now that this address of his has been public, Im sure he gets more than just a few e-mails a day. He's really going to take time out of his day to insult a student journalist? Well, I guess I would . . .

Want a Peel for Your iPod Touch?

So, do you want a Peel for your iPod Touch?

Yes, it’s a clever little play on Apple’s brand, the Peel – a device that Sprint may soon offer to iPod Touch owners enabling them to communicate over Sprint’s cell network for an as-yet undetermined monthly charge.

A Chinese company’s version of a similar product (also using the clever Peel name) is the one getting the press, but it has a few disadvantages, according to some reviews. The biggest: It’s available only in China. Sprint’s version, however, may also run into trouble, as Apple is, well, kinda proprietary about its products. It appears, though, that Sprint would keep the Peel-enabled iPod Touches to data only – no voice, thus not cutting into the iPhone market. That might help take the curse off it. Then again, given the capriciousness of Apple, it might not.

Would I buy one? I’d consider it. I can see the utility – I have an hour and a half commute home every night on the bus that a 3G-enabled iPod Touch would certainly help to fill. But it all comes down to the pricing. If I could have unlimited access for, say $20 a month, it enters the realm of maybe. Or a pay-as-you-go model might work as well and would certainly curb my use of the device to essential use only, while at the same time not overloading Sprint’s network.

Of course, I'd have to buy a 64gig iPod Touch. So maybe if the utility is there, the price-savings isn't.

Then there's the aggravation factor. When I travel, I enjoy being Internetless while on the road. I can pick up free wi-fi at hotels and such for when I’m really jonesing for an online fix. The ability to surf the web or check e-mail no matter where I am still seems, at the bottom of all things, an expense I can do without.

Walkman vs. iPod Family: Sony Holds Up Well

I won a Sony mp3 player at my company picnic yesterday, which is exciting news, since I rarely win anything in raffles of this nature.

But here's the funny part: I'd almost forgotten that Apple isn't the only company that makes such devices. That's both good and bad for Apple.

We have four iPod-branded devices at home. Two 32-gig iPod Touches, an iPod Nano, and a standard iPod. Add this Sony player and now we've got one for each member of the family. They vary in their utility for playing music and, in all but one case, video.

For music, the standard iPod and Nano are the best because -- and this'll sound nit-picky -- because the UI for the simpler devices is better for playing music. If I want to shut down the music playing on my iPod Touch, I have to turn the thing back on, unlock it, then shut the music off. With the standard iPod and the Nano, it's just one push of one button, and it's off.

For video, the iPod Touches, of course, are better, simply because their screens are a bit larger. The iPod Nano does play video, but on that tiny 2-inch screen.

I haven't had a real chance to test-drive the Sony yet -- and I love that it's of the Walkman brand; I had one of the original cassette-playing Walkmans back in the 1980s and thought I was one of the coolest people on the face of the planet. But, so far, I'm impressed.

My wife juggles two iPod iterations on her computer. That means that through iTunes, she has to set up two different libraries, and has to remember a certain key combination when she starts iTunes in order to get to the right library. It works maybe two out of three times. The other two iPod devices we have running on separate computers, a desktop and a laptop. Moving music from one to the other is a painful process of either e-mailing or using thumb drives.

The Sony has an incredible UI that Apple could learn from. Sony has set up their device to run like a thumb drive -- and you don't even have to eject the device to disconnect it from the computer. Yes, the iPod Touches do that, but the Sony does something a bit more than that.

Sony recognizes that people who buy their mp3 players likely already have Apple players and iTunes. Rather than making their own complicated library software, Sony just says, hey, drag and drop your music from iTunes over to the Walkman and you're good to go. You can also organize through Windows Media, but if you've already got iTunes, why bother?

Another nifty feature. I noted seeing the package that the Sony would play movies, but only those in the WMV format. I thought that was kind of disappointing, given that I've got a lot of movies and TV shows in the mp4 format. However, Sony has a nifty little feature that converts any incompatible video file format to WMV and thus allow them to be played on the Walkman. I tried the conversion out with a few fifteen-minute cartoons, and the conversions took less than a minute. The videos play just fine. Maybe there's a little degradation of quality, but when you're squinting at a 2-inch screen to watch Donal Duck, you're not going to be all that picky, are you?

The model I won is an 8-gig one, so not terribly large compared to the 16-gig Nano and 32-gig iPod Touches. If I'd been shopping for another player, I would have bought one with a larger capacity. But having used this Sony for only a short time, I'd certainly consider, if I were in the market for a new music/video player, buying on that's not an Apple brand. The ease of moving music over to the new player and the fact I don't have to construct a new library is a big bonus, as is the Sony's ability to do the mp4 to WMV conversion. Sony and the others may be in the secondary mp3 player market, but they're certainly playing that market extremely well.

No Smartphone Folk Us

My wife and I are technological anachronisms.

We have one cell phone between the two of us. One. As in only one phone, for two people. And all this phone does is make phone calls. Oh, we can send text messages too, but since we only have one phone, who are we sending them to?

We have other little hand-held gadgets: Between the two of us, we have two iPod Touches and two regular iPods. For the Touches, we use our home network or, when we can, a free wi-fi network. My wife has a Kindle that cadges onto a free cell network wherever she goes.

We don’t have smartphones. We don’t have a cell phone plan – ours is pay-per-use. We’re not dropping the $70 to $100 a month that others do for their fancy gadgets. Oh, we could probably find many reasons to sign up, but to tell the truth, we’re not missing right now what we’ve never had.

We do have wireless Internet at home. When we didn’t have broadband, I missed it. We were on DSL for a while, then, to save money, we were on dial-up. Then we went back to broadband, and we’ll never go back to anything else. But we knew what we were missing. With cell phones, not so much.

Now AT&T, home of the iPhone, is implementing a 2GB cap for smartphone data use, with $10 per additional gigabyte charges after that, on top of the $25 paid for the first two. Do not want. Do not need. We’ve got no data limits on our home network, which is a good thing, since we’d likely be paying extra every month if we did.

The irony here is that Apple today announced its iPhone 4, which features, among “100 new features that aren’t available on the current iPhone 3GS,” per CNN.com, the ability to video chat. Steve Jobs says this of this new technological feat:

I grew up with the Jetsons dreaming about video phones. It's real now.

So how long of a video chat can you do for under 2GB, and still be able to use your smartphone before getting smacked with extra fees? Well, probably not much. This, per AT&T:

2 GB is the equivalent of 10,000 emails without attachments, 1,500 emails with attachments, 4,000 Web pages, posting 500 photos to social media sites, and 200 minutes of streaming video combined.

How quickly one will go over that limit – and incur more charges – is anyone’s guess. But since Americans in general have lost common sense when it comes to cell phones, they won’t blink at the additional gigabyte charges (I know.; I used to work for Qwest and got innumerable calls from folks with horrendous cell phone bills that they just up and paid because, “Ya gotta have a cell phone.”). Yeah. With all the doodads.

I think I can hear George Jetson’s reaction right about now:

But do I need Internet everywhere? Sure, it would have been fun to send a tweet from the top of the Teton Dam this past weekend, but would it really have been worth the $80 a month just to do that, or even to just do that a few hundred times in a given month? Not really. I don’t need real-time broadcasting of my inane activities when I can do virtual real time when I get back home.

Freedom from Pornography

Dear Steve Jobs,

If Valleywag’s Ryan Tate is to be believed, and the e-mail exchange he touts between himself and you is real, I have this to say:

Bravo.

But it’s a qualified bravo. Does Apple’s App Store still sell what I consider pornography? Yes. I have to say, however, since the App Store purge of a few months ago, there’s a lot less there, or at least a lot less visible. That’s certainly a step in the right direction, but the App Store is hardly porn-free, at least by my definition of porn. I’m willing to concede that my definition – coming from an adherent to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – is narrower than what Apple is using. Nevertheless, thank you for what you’re doing.

I’ve seen many ironies circulating around the App Store porn debate. One supporter of Mr. Tate cites L. Ron Hubbard in defining what freedom is as Mr. Tate takes on your desire of a world “free of porn.” Considering how hostile the Internet is towards Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, the tautology there is more than striking.

I have to admit I’m holding my breath for an upsurge of people desiring the App Store to be “free of religion,” as a backlash to the freedom from porn. They’ll try to frame it as an apples-to-apples debate, which it most certainly is not. From what I’ve read, there are many like me willing to concede to a certain amount of risqué apps as long as their icons and descriptions don’t go overboard, or, as I’ve suggested earlier, they were offered in a section for risqué business only. I’d hardly expect the anti-religionistas to offer the same concessions.

To them, I turn their own idea upon their own heads: Don’t like it, don’t look at it.

Now, I have seen people – including members of my won family – become disaffected by religion, or become hurt by it, or bristle when the subject is even brought up. I know there are people out there who truly do desire freedom from religion. I do not shove my religion into their faces because I know it bothers them.

Why, then, should they insist on shoving pornography in my face even though they know it bothers me? I’ve written before about the effects of pornography in my family. It’s certainly had a much more negative effect in my circle of friends, family, and acquaintances than religion has had.

I laugh at their arguments that since Apple’s products come with web browsers, pornography is only a few clicks away, so Apple may as well allow pornographic apps. That’s just like saying since AK-47s can be obtained outside of licensed gun shops, they should be available everywhere, or, since religious symbols can be seen at churches they also ought to be prominently displayed on public property. Turn the argument on its head enough and they’ll see how faulty it really is.

Apple has the right to conduct business as it sees fit. If Apple desires to exclude pornography, or religion, or whatever topic you could choose, that is Apple’s right. Freedom to protest is also a right. Freedom also means that freedoms do not necessarily have to be reconciled. To stray from quoting L. Ron Hubbard to quoting Mahandas Gandhi:

All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.

Maybe in the future, Mr. Jobs, I’ll find myself on the opposite side of the fence when it comes to Apple touting “freedom from x.” I won’t deny the possibility. But for now, let me say thanks.